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| | <TITLE>Burton J. Hendrick. The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page. 1922. Chapters 1-2.</TITLE> |
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| <TITLE>Burton J. Hendrick. The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page. 1922. Chapters 1-2.</TITLE>
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| earth had been the home of unbroken peace. (<A NAME="n3"></A><A | | earth had been the home of unbroken peace. (<A NAME="n3"></A><A |
| HREF="Pagenotes.htm#3">3</A>)</BLOCKQUOTE> | | HREF="Pagenotes.htm#3">3</A>)</BLOCKQUOTE> |
|
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| <br><br>.
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|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">II</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>And so it was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been
| |
| born. He was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end,
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| and his early life was therefore cast in a desolate country. Like
| |
| all of his neighbours, Frank Page had been ruined by the war.
| |
| Both the Southern and Northern armies had passed over the Page
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| territory; compared with the military depredations with which
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| Page became familiar in the last years of his life, the Federal
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| troops did not particularly misbehave, the attacks on hen roosts
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| and the destruction of feather beds representing the extreme of
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| their "atrocities"; but no country can entertain two
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| great fighting forces without feeling the effects for a prolonged
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| period. Life in this part of North Carolina again became reduced
| |
| to its. fundamentals. The old homesteads and the Negro huts were
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| still left standing, and their interiors were for the most part
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| unharmed, but nearly everything else had disappeared. Horses,
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| cattle, hogs, livestock of all kinds had vanished before the advancing
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| hosts of hungry soldiers; and there was one thing which was even
| |
| more a rarity than these. That was money. Confederate veterans
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| went around in their faded gray uniforms, not only because they
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| loved them, but because they did not have the wherewithal to buy
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| new wardrobes. Judges, planters, and other dignified members of
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| the community became hack drivers from the necessity of picking
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| up a few small coins. Page's father was more fortunate than the
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| rest, for he had one asset with which to accumulate a little liquid
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| capital; he possessed a fine peach orchard, which was particularly
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| productive in the summer of 1865, and the Northern soldiers, who
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| drew their pay in money that had real value, developed a weakness
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| for the fruit. Walter Page, a boy of ten, used to take his peaches
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| to Raleigh, and sell them to the "invader"; although
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| he still disdained having companionable relations with the enemy,
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| he was not above meeting them on a business footing; and the greenbacks
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| and silver coin obtained in this way laid a new basis for the
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| family fortunes.
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|
| |
| <br><br>Despite this happy windfall, life for the next few years proved
| |
| an arduous affair. The horrors of reconstruction which followed
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| the war were more agonizing than the war itself. Page's keenest
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| inspiration in after life was, democracy, in its several manifestations;
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| but the form in which democracy first unrolled before his astonished
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| eyes was a phase that could hardly inspire much enthusiasm. Misguided
| |
| sentimentalists and more malicious politicians in the North had
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| suddenly endowed the Negro with the ballot. In practically all
| |
| Southern States that meant government by Negroes---or what was
| |
| even worse, government by a combination of Negroes and the most
| |
| vicious white elements, including that which was native to the
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| soil and that which had imported itself from the North for this
| |
| particular purpose. Thus the political vocabulary of Page's formative
| |
| years consisted chiefly of such words as "scalawag,"
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| "carpet bagger," "regulator," "Union
| |
| League," "Ku Klux Klan," and the like. The resulting
| |
| confusion, political, social, and economic, did not completely
| |
| amount to the destruction of a civilization, for underneath it
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| all the old sleepy ante-bellum South still maintained its existence
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| almost unchanged. The two most conspicuous and contrasting figures
| |
| were the Confederate veteran walking around in a sleeveless coat
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| and the sharp-featured New England school mar'm, armed with that
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| spelling book which was overnight to change the African from a
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| genial barbarian into an intelligent and conscientious social
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| unit; but more persistent than these forces was that old dreamy,
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| "unprogressive" Southland---the same country that Page
| |
| himself described in an article on "An Old Southern Borough
| |
| " which, as a young man, he contributed to the <I>Atlantic
| |
| Monthly. </I>It was still the country where the "old-fashioned
| |
| gentleman " was the controlling social influence, where a
| |
| knowledge of Latin and Greek still made its possessor a person
| |
| of consideration, where Emerson was a "Yankee philosopher"
| |
| and therefore not important, where Shakespeare and Milton were
| |
| looked upon almost as contemporary authors, where the Church and
| |
| politics and the matrimonial history of friends and relatives
| |
| formed the staple of conversation, and where a strong prejudice
| |
| still existed against anything that resembled popular education.
| |
| In the absence of more substantial employment, stump speaking,
| |
| especially eloquent in praise of the South and its achievements
| |
| in war, had become the leading industry.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>"Wat" Page---he is still known by this name in his
| |
| old home---was a tall, rangy, curly-headed boy, with brown hair
| |
| and brown eyes, fond of fishing and hunting, not especially robust,
| |
| but conspicuously alert and vital. Such of his old playmates as
| |
| survive recall chiefly his keenness of observation, his contagious
| |
| laughter, his devotion to reading and to talk. He was also given
| |
| to taking long walks in the woods, frequently with the solitary
| |
| companionship of a book. Indeed, his extremely efficient family
| |
| regarded him as a dreamer and were not entirely clear as to what
| |
| purpose he was destined to serve in a community which, above all,
| |
| demanded practical men. Such elementary schools as North Carolina
| |
| possessed had vanished in the war; the prevailing custom was for
| |
| the better-conditioned families to join forces and engage a teacher
| |
| for their assembled children. It was in such a primary school
| |
| in Cary that Page learned the elementary branches, though his
| |
| mother herself taught him to read and write. The boy showed such
| |
| aptitude in his studies that his mother began to hope, though
| |
| in no aggressive fashion, that he might some day become a Methodist
| |
| clergyman; she had given him his middle name, "Hines,"
| |
| in honour of her favourite preacher---a kinsman. At the age of
| |
| twelve Page was transferred to the Bingham School, then located
| |
| at Mebane. This was the Eton of North Carolina, from both a social
| |
| and an educational standpoint. It was a military school; the boys
| |
| all dressed in gray uniforms built on the plan of the Confederate
| |
| army; the hero constantly paraded before their imaginations was
| |
| Robert E. Lee; discipline was rigidly military; more important,
| |
| a high standard of honour was insisted upon. There was one thing
| |
| a boy could not do at Bingham and remain in the school; that was
| |
| to cheat in class-rooms or at examinations. For this offence no
| |
| second chance was given. "I cannot argue the subject,"
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| Page quotes Colonel Bingham saying to the distracted parent whose
| |
| son had been dismissed on this charge, and who was begging for
| |
| his reinstatement. "In fact, I have no power to reinstate
| |
| your boy. I could not keep the honour of the school---I could
| |
| not even keep the boys, if he were to return. They would appeal
| |
| to their parents and most of them would be called home. They are
| |
| the flower of the South, Sir!" And the social standards that
| |
| controlled the thinking of the South for so many years after the
| |
| war were strongly entrenched. "The son of a Confederate general,"
| |
| Page writes, "if he were at all a decent fellow, had, of
| |
| course, a higher social rank at the Bingham School than the son
| |
| of a colonel. There was some difficulty in deciding the exact
| |
| rank of a judge or a governor, as a father; but the son of a preacher
| |
| had a fair chance of a good social rating, especially of an Episcopalian
| |
| clergyman. A Presbyterian preacher came next in rank. I at first
| |
| was at a social disadvantage. My father had been a Methodist---that
| |
| was bad enough; but he had had no military title at all. If it
| |
| had become known among the boys that he had been a 'Union man'---I
| |
| used to shudder at the suspicion in which I should be held. And
| |
| the fact that my father had held no military title did at last
| |
| become known!"
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>A single episode discloses that Page maintained his respect
| |
| for the Bingham School to the end. In March, 1918, as American
| |
| Ambassador, he went up to Harrow and gave an informal talk to
| |
| the boys on the United States. His hosts were so pleased that
| |
| two prizes were established to commemorate his visit. One was
| |
| for an essay by Harrow boys on the subject: "The Drawing
| |
| Together of America and Great Britain by Common Devotion to a
| |
| Great Cause." A similar prize on the same subject was offered
| |
| to the boys of some American school, and Page was asked to select
| |
| the recipient. He promptly named his old Bingham School in North
| |
| Carolina.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>It was at Bingham that Page gained his first knowledge of Greek,
| |
| Latin, and mathematics, and he was an outstanding student in all
| |
| three subjects. He had no particular liking for mathematics, but
| |
| he could never understand why any one should find this branch
| |
| of learning difficult; he mastered it with the utmost case and
| |
| always stood high. In two or three years he had absorbed everything
| |
| that Bingham could offer and was ready for the next step. But
| |
| political conditions in North Carolina now had their influence
| |
| upon Page's educational plans. Under ordinary conditions he would
| |
| have entered the State University at Chapel Hill; it had been
| |
| a great headquarters in ante-bellum days for the prosperous families
| |
| of the South. But by the time that Page was ready to go to college
| |
| the University had fallen upon evil days. The forces which then
| |
| ruled the state, acting in accordance with the new principles
| |
| of racial equality, had opened the doors of this, one of the most
| |
| aristocratic of Southern institutions, to Negroes. The consequences
| |
| may be easily imagined. The newly enfranchised blacks showed no
| |
| inclination for the groves of Academe, and not a single representative
| |
| of the race applied for matriculation. The outraged white population
| |
| turned its back upon this new type of coeducation; in the autumn
| |
| of 1872 not a solitary white boy made his appearance. The old
| |
| university therefore closed its doors for lack of students and
| |
| for the next few years it became a pitiable victim to the worst
| |
| vices of the reconstruction era. Politicians were awarded the
| |
| presidency and the professorships as political pap, and the resources
| |
| of the place, in money and in books, were scattered to the wind.
| |
| Page had therefore to find his education elsewhere. The deep religious
| |
| feelings of his family quickly settled this point. The young man
| |
| promptly betook himself to the backwoods of North Carolina and
| |
| knocked at the doors of Trinity College, a Methodist Institution
| |
| then located in Randolph County. Trinity has since changed its
| |
| abiding place to Durham and has been transformed into one of the
| |
| largest and most successful colleges of the new South; but in
| |
| those days a famous Methodist divine and journalist described
| |
| it as "a college with a few buildings that look like tobacco
| |
| barns and a few teachers that look as though they ought to be
| |
| worming tobacco." Page spent something more than a year at
| |
| Trinity, entering in the autumn of 1871, and leaving in December,
| |
| 1872. A few letters, written from this place, are scarcely more
| |
| complimentary than the judgment passed above. They show that the
| |
| young man was very unhappy. One long letter to his mother is nothing
| |
| but a boyish diatribe against the place. "I do not care a
| |
| horse apple for Trinity's distinction," he writes, and then
| |
| he gives the reasons for this juvenile contempt. His first report,
| |
| he says, will soon reach home; he warns his mother that it will
| |
| be unfavourable, and he explains that this bad showing is the
| |
| result of a deliberate plot. The boys who obtain high marks, Page
| |
| declares, secure them usually by cheating or through the partisanship
| |
| of the professors; a high grade therefore really means that the
| |
| recipient is either a humbug or a bootlicker. Page had therefore
| |
| attempted to keep his reputation unsullied by aiming at a low
| |
| academic record! The report on that three months' work, which
| |
| still survives, discloses that Page's conspiracy against himself
| |
| did not succeed for his marks are all high. "Be sure to send
| |
| him back" is the annotation on this document, indicating
| |
| that Page had made a better impression on Trinity than Trinity
| |
| had made on Page.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>But the rebellious young man did not return. After Christmas,
| |
| 1872, his schoolboy letters reveal him at Randolph-Macon College
| |
| in Ashland, Va. Here again the atmosphere is Methodistical, but
| |
| of a somewhat more genial type. "It was at Ashland that I
| |
| first began to unfold," said Page afterward. "Dear old
| |
| Ashland!" Dr. Duncan, the President, was a clergyman whose
| |
| pulpit oratory is still a tradition in the South, but, in addition
| |
| to his religious exaltation, he was an exceedingly lovable, companionable,
| |
| and stimulating human being. Certainly there was no lack of the
| |
| religious impulse. "We have a preacher president, "
| |
| Page writes his mother, "a preacher secretary, a preacher
| |
| chaplain, and a dozen preacher students and three or more preachers
| |
| are living here and twenty-five or thirty yet-to-be preachers
| |
| in college!" In this latter class Page evidently places himself;
| |
| at least he gravely writes his mother---he was now eighteen---that
| |
| he had definitely made up his mind to enter the Methodist ministry.
| |
| He had a close friend---Wilbur Fisk Tillett---who cherished similar
| |
| ambitions, and Page one day surprised Tillett by suggesting that,
| |
| at the approaching Methodist Conference, they apply for licensing
| |
| as "local preachers" for the next summer. His friend
| |
| dissuaded him, however, and henceforth Page concentrated on more
| |
| worldly studies. In many ways he was the fife of the undergraduate
| |
| body. His desire for an immediate theological campaign was merely
| |
| that passion for doing things and for self-expression which were
| |
| always conspicuous traits. His intense ambition as a boy is still
| |
| remembered in this sleepy little village. He read every book in
| |
| the sparse college library; he talked to his college mates and
| |
| his professors on every imaginable subject; he led his associates
| |
| in the miniature parliament ---the Franklin Debating Society---to
| |
| which he belonged; he wrote prose and verse at an astonishing
| |
| rate; he explored the country for miles around, making frequent
| |
| pilgrimages to the birthplace of Henry Clay, which is the chief
| |
| historical glory of Ashland, and to that Hanover Court House which
| |
| was the scene of the oratorical triumph of Patrick Henry; he flirted
| |
| with the pretty girls in the village, and even had two half-serious
| |
| love affairs in rapid succession; he slept upon a hard mattress
| |
| at night and imbibed more than the usual allotment of Greek, Latin,
| |
| and mathematics in the daytime. One year he captured the Greek
| |
| prize and the next the Sutherlin medal for oratory. With a fellow
| |
| classicist he entered into a solemn compact to hold all their
| |
| conversation, even on the most trivial topics, in Latin, with
| |
| heavy penalties for careless lapses into English. Probably the
| |
| linguistic result would have astonished Quintilian, but the experiment
| |
| at least had a certain influence in improving the young man's
| |
| Latinity. Another favourite dissipation was that of translating
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| English masterpieces into the ancient tongue; there still survives
| |
| among Page's early papers a copy of Bryant's "Waterfowl "
| |
| done into Latin iambics. As to Page's personal appearance, a designation
| |
| coined by a fellow student who afterward be came a famous editor
| |
| gives the suggestion of a portrait. He called him one of the "seven
| |
| slabs" of the college. And, as always, the adjectives which
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| his contemporaries chiefly use in describing Page are "alert"
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| and "positive. "
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|
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| <br><br><CENTER><TABLE WIDTH="297" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="2"
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| CELLPADDING="0">
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| <TR>
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| <TD WIDTH="48%">
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| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <A HREF="images/Page02.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Page02tn.jpg"
| |
| WIDTH="113" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="1" ></A></TD>
| |
| <TD WIDTH="52%">
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <A HREF="images/Page03.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Page03tn.jpg"
| |
| WIDTH="111" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="1" ></A></TD>
| |
| </TR>
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| <TR>
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| <TD WIDTH="48%">
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <B><FONT COLOR="#0000ff">Fig. 2.</FONT></B><FONT
| |
| COLOR="#0000ff"> Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of
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| Walter H. Page</FONT></TD>
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| <TD WIDTH="52%">
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| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <B><FONT COLOR="#0000ff">Fig. 3.</FONT></B><FONT
| |
| COLOR="#0000ff"> Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother
| |
| of Walter H. Page</FONT></TD>
| |
| </TR>
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| </TABLE></CENTER>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>But Randolph-Macon did one great thing for Page. Like many
| |
| small struggling Southern colleges it managed to assemble several
| |
| instructors of real mental distinction. And at the time of Page's
| |
| undergraduate life it possessed at least one great teacher. This
| |
| was Thomas R. Price, afterward Professor of Greek at the University
| |
| of Virginia and Professor of English at Columbia University in
| |
| New York. Professor Price took one forward step that has given
| |
| him a permanent fame in the history of Southern education. He
| |
| found that the greatest stumbling block to teaching Greek was
| |
| not the conditional mood, but the fact that his hopeful charges
| |
| were not sufficiently familiar with their mother tongue. The prayer
| |
| that was always on Price's lips, and the one with which he made
| |
| his boys most familiar, was that of a wise old Greek: "O
| |
| Great Apollo, send down the reviving rain upon our fields; preserve
| |
| our flocks; ward off our enemies; and---build up our speech!"
| |
| "It is irrational," he said, "absurd, almost criminal,
| |
| to expect a young man, whose knowledge of English words and construction
| |
| is scant and inexact, to put into English a difficult thought
| |
| of Plato or an involved period of Cicero." Above all, it
| |
| will be observed, Price's intellectual enthusiasm was the ancient
| |
| tongue. A present-day argument for learning Greek and Latin is
| |
| that thereby we improve our English; but Thomas R. Price advocated
| |
| the teaching of English so that we might better understand the
| |
| dead languages. To-day every great American educational institution
| |
| has vast resources for teaching English literature; even in 1876,
| |
| most American universities had their professors of English; but
| |
| Price insisted on placing English on exactly the same footing
| |
| as Greek and Latin. He himself became head of the new English
| |
| school at Randolph-Macon; and Page himself at once became the
| |
| favourite pupil. This distinguished scholar---a fine figure with
| |
| an imperial beard that suggested the Confederate officer---used
| |
| to have Page to tea at least twice a week and at these meetings
| |
| the young man was first introduced in an understanding way to
| |
| Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the other writers
| |
| who became the literary passions of his maturer life. And Price
| |
| did even more for Page; he passed him on to another place and
| |
| to another teacher who extended his horizon. Up to the autumn
| |
| of 1876 Page had never gone farther North than Ashland; he was
| |
| still a Southern boy, speaking with the Southern drawl, living
| |
| exclusively the thoughts and even the prejudices of the South.
| |
| His family's broad-minded attitude had prevented him from acquiring
| |
| a too restricted view of certain problems that were then vexing
| |
| both sections of the country; however, his outlook was still a
| |
| limited one, as his youthful correspondence shows. But in October
| |
| of the centennial year a great prospect opened before him.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>.
| |
|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">III</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Two or three years previously an eccentric merchant named Johns
| |
| Hopkins had died, leaving the larger part of his fortune to found
| |
| a college or university in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins was not an
| |
| educated man himself and his conception of a new college did not
| |
| extend beyond creating something in the nature of a Yale or Harvard
| |
| in Maryland. By a lucky chance, however, a Yale graduate who was
| |
| then the President of the University of California, Daniel Coit
| |
| Gilman, was invited to come to Baltimore and discuss with the
| |
| trustees his availability for the headship of the new institution.
| |
| Dr. Gilman promptly informed his prospective employers that he
| |
| would have no interest in associating himself with a new American
| |
| college built upon the lines of those which then existed. Such
| |
| a foundation would merely be a duplication of work already well
| |
| done elsewhere and therefore a waste of money and effort. He proposed
| |
| that this large endowment should he used, not for the erection
| |
| of expensive architecture, but primarily for seeking out, in all
| |
| parts of the world, the best professorial brains in certain approved
| |
| branches of learning. In the same spirit he suggested that a similarly
| |
| selective process be adopted in the choice of students: that only
| |
| those American boys who had displayed exceptional promise should
| |
| be admitted and that part of the university funds should be used
| |
| to pay the expenses of twenty young men who, in undergraduate
| |
| work at other colleges, stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries.
| |
| The bringing together of these two sets of brains for graduate
| |
| study would constitute the new university. A few rooms in the
| |
| nearest dwelling house would suffice for headquarters. Dr. Gilman's
| |
| scheme was approved; he became President on these terms; he gathered
| |
| his faculty not only in the United States but in England, and
| |
| he collected his first body of students, especially his first
| |
| twenty fellows, with the same minute care.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>It seems almost a miracle that an inexperienced youth in a
| |
| little Methodist college in Virginia should have been chosen as
| |
| one of these first twenty fellows, and it is a sufficient tribute
| |
| to the impression that Page must have made upon all who met him
| |
| that he should have won this great academic distinction. He was
| |
| only twenty-one at the time---the youngest of a group nearly every
| |
| member of which became distinguished in after life. He won a Fellowship
| |
| in Greek. This in itself was a great good fortune; even greater
| |
| was the fact that his new life brought him into immediate contact
| |
| with a scholar of great genius and lovableness. Someone has said
| |
| that America has produced four scholars of the very first rank---Agassiz
| |
| in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard Gibbs in physics,
| |
| and Gildersleeve in Greek. It was the last of these who now took
| |
| Walter Page in charge.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>The atmosphere of Johns Hopkins was quite different from anything
| |
| which the young man had previously known. The university gave
| |
| a great shock to that part of the American community with which
| |
| Page had spent his life by beginning its first session in October,
| |
| 1876, without an opening prayer. Instead Thomas H. Huxley was
| |
| invited from England to deliver a scientific address---an address
| |
| which now has an honoured place in his collected works. The absence
| |
| of prayer and the presence of so audacious a Darwinian as Huxley
| |
| caused a tremendous excitement in the public prints, the religious
| |
| press, and the evangelical pulpit. In the minds of Gilman and
| |
| his abettors, however, all this was intended to emphasize the
| |
| fact that Johns Hopkins was a real university, in which the unbiased
| |
| truth was to be the only aim. And certainly this was the spirit
| |
| of the institution. "Gentlemen, you must light your own torch,"
| |
| was the admonition of President Gilman, in his welcoming address
| |
| to his twenty fellows; intellectual independence, freedom from
| |
| the trammels of tradition, were thus to be the directing ideas.
| |
| One of Page's associates was Josiah Royce, who afterward had a
| |
| distinguished career in philosophy at Harvard. "The beginnings
| |
| of Johns Hopkins," he afterward wrote, "was a dawn wherein
| |
| it was bliss to be alive. The air was full of noteworthy work
| |
| done by the older men of the place and of hopes that one might
| |
| find a way to get a little working power one's self. One longed
| |
| to be a doer of the word, not a hearer only, a creator of his
| |
| own infinitesimal fraction of the product, bound in God's name
| |
| to produce when the time came."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>A choice group of five aspiring Grecians, of whom Page was
| |
| one, periodically gathered around a long pine table in a second-story
| |
| room of an old dwelling house on Howard Street, with Professor
| |
| Gildersleeve at the head. The process of teaching was thus the
| |
| intimate contact of mind with mind. Here in the course of nearly
| |
| two years' residence, Page was led by Professor Gildersleeve into
| |
| the closest communion with the great minds of the ancient world
| |
| and gained that intimate knowledge of their written word which
| |
| was the basis of his mental equipment. "Professor Gildersleeve,
| |
| splendid scholar that he is!" he wrote to a friend in North
| |
| Carolina. "He makes me grow wonderfully. When I have a chance
| |
| to enjoy Æschylus as I have now, I go to work on those immortal
| |
| pieces with a pleasure that swallows up everything." To the
| |
| extent that Gildersleeve opened up the literary treasures of the
| |
| past---and no man had a greater appreciation of his favourite
| |
| authors than this fine humanist---Page's life was one of unalloyed
| |
| delight. But there was another side to the picture. This little
| |
| company of scholars was composed of men who aspired to no ordinary
| |
| knowledge of Greek; they expected to devote their entire lives
| |
| to the subject, to edit Greek texts, and to hold Greek chairs
| |
| at the leading American universities. Such, indeed, has been the
| |
| career of nearly all members of the group. The Greek tragedies
| |
| were therefore read for other things than their stylistic and
| |
| dramatic values. The sons of Germania then exercised a profound
| |
| influence on American education; Professor Gildersleeve himself
| |
| was a graduate of Göttingen, and the necessity of "settling
| |
| hoti's business" was strong in his seminar. Gildersleeve
| |
| was a writer of English who developed real style; as a Greek scholar,
| |
| his fame rests chiefly upon his work in the field of historical
| |
| syntax. He assumed that his students could read Greek as easily
| |
| as they could read French, and the really important tasks he set
| |
| them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology. For
| |
| work of this kind Page had little interest and less inclination.
| |
| When Professor Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb <FONT
| |
| COLOR="#0000ff"><IMG SRC="images/Greek1.gif" WIDTH="25" HEIGHT="15"
| |
| ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0" ></FONT>, and direct
| |
| him to study the peculiarities of its use from Homer down to the
| |
| Byzantine writers, he found himself in pretty deep waters. Was
| |
| it conceivable that a man could spend a lifetime in an occupation
| |
| of this kind? By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most
| |
| advanced pupils uncovered many new facts about the language and
| |
| even found hitherto unsuspected beauties; but Page's letters show
| |
| that this sort of effort was extremely uncongenial. He fulminates
| |
| against the "grammarians" and begins to think that perhaps,
| |
| after all, a career of erudite scholarship is not the ideal existence.
| |
| "Learn to look on me as a Greek drudge," he writes,
| |
| "somewhere pounding into men and boys a faint hint of the
| |
| beauty of old Greekdom. That's most probably what I shall come
| |
| to before many years. I am sure that I have mistaken my lifework,
| |
| if I consider Greek my lifework. In truth at times I am tempted
| |
| to throw the whole thing away. . . . But without a home feeling
| |
| in Greek literature no man can lay claim to high culture."
| |
| So he would keep at it for three or four years and "then
| |
| leave it as a man's work." Despite these despairing words
| |
| Page acquired a living knowledge of Greek that was one of his
| |
| choicest possessions through life. That he made a greater success
| |
| than his self-depreciation would imply is evident from the fact
| |
| that his Fellowship, was renewed for the next year.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>But the truth is that the world was tugging at Page more insistently
| |
| than the cloister. "Speaking grammatically," writes
| |
| Prof. E. G. Sihler, one of Page's fellow students of that time,
| |
| in his "Confessions and Convictions of a Classicist,"
| |
| "Page was interested in that one of the main tenses which
| |
| we call the Present." In his after life, amid all the excitements
| |
| of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend it with
| |
| Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him
| |
| even more than did the heroes of the ancient world. He went somewhat
| |
| into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club
| |
| whose membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the
| |
| town; probably his most congenial associations, however, came
| |
| of the Saturday night meetings of the fellows in Hopkins Hall,
| |
| where, over pipes and steins of beer, they passed in review all
| |
| the questions of the day. Page was still the Southern boy, with
| |
| the strange notions about the North and Northern people which
| |
| were the inheritance of many years' misunderstandings. He writes
| |
| of one fellow student to whom he had taken a liking. "He
| |
| is that rare thing, " he says, "a Yankee Christian gentleman."
| |
| He particularly dislikes one of his instructors, but, as he explains,
| |
| "he is a native of Connecticut, and Connecticut, I suppose,
| |
| is capable of producing any unholy human phenomenon." Speaking
| |
| of a beautiful and well mannered Greek girl whom he had met, he
| |
| writes: "The little creature might be taken for a Southern
| |
| girl, but never for a Yankee. She has an easy manner and even
| |
| an air of gentility about her that doesn't appear north of Mason
| |
| and Dixon's Line. Indeed, however much the Southern race (I say
| |
| race intentionally: Yankeedom is the home of another race from
| |
| us) however much the Southern race owes its strength to Anglo-Saxon
| |
| blood, it owes its beauty and gracefulness to the Southern climate
| |
| and culture. Who says that we are not an improvement on the English?
| |
| An improvement in a happy combination of mental graces and Saxon
| |
| force?" This sort of thing is especially entertaining in
| |
| the youthful Page, for it is precisely against this kind of complacency
| |
| that, as a mature man, he directed his choicest ridicule. As an
| |
| editor and writer his energies were devoted to reconciling North
| |
| and South, and Johns Hopkins itself had much to do with opening
| |
| his eyes. Its young men and its professors were gathered from
| |
| all parts of the country; a student, if his mind was awake, learned
| |
| more than Greek and mathematics; he learned much about that far-flung
| |
| nation known as the United States.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>And Page did not confine his work exclusively to the curriculum.
| |
| He writes that he is regularly attending a German Sunday School,
| |
| not, however, from religious motives, but from a desire to improve
| |
| his colloquial German. "Is this courting the Devil for knowledge?"
| |
| he asks. And all this time he was engaging in a delightful correspondence---from
| |
| which these quotations are taken ---with a young woman in North
| |
| Carolina, his cousin. About this time this cousin began spending
| |
| her summers in the Page home at Cary; her great interest in books
| |
| made the two young people good friends and companions. It was
| |
| she who first introduced Page to certain Southern writers, especially
| |
| Timrod and Sidney Lanier, and, when Page left for Johns Hopkins,
| |
| the two entered into a compact for a systematic reading and study
| |
| of the English poets. According to this plan, certain parts of
| |
| Tennyson or Chaucer would be set aside for a particular week's
| |
| reading; then both would write the impressions gained and the
| |
| criticisms which they assumed to make, and send the product to
| |
| the other. The plan was carried out more faithfully than is usually
| |
| the case in such arrangements; a large number of Page's letters
| |
| survive and give a complete history of his mental progress. There
| |
| are lengthy disquisitions on Wordsworth, Browning, Byron, Shelley,
| |
| Matthew Arnold, and the like. These letters also show that Page,
| |
| as a relaxation from Greek roots and syntax, was indulging in
| |
| poetic flights of his own; his efforts, which he encloses in his
| |
| letters, are mainly imitations of the particular poet in whom
| |
| he was at the moment interested. This correspondence also takes
| |
| Page to Germany, in which country he spent the larger part of
| |
| the summer of 1877. This choice of the Fatherland as a place of
| |
| pilgrimage was probably merely a reflection of the enthusiasm
| |
| for German educational methods which then prevailed in the United
| |
| States, especially at Johns Hopkins. Page's letters are the usual
| |
| traveller's descriptions of unfamiliar customs, museums, libraries,
| |
| and the like; so far as enlarging his outlook was concerned the
| |
| experience does not seem to have been especially profitable.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>He returned to Baltimore in the autumn of 1877, but only for
| |
| a few months. He had pretty definitely abandoned his plan of devoting
| |
| his life to Greek scholarship. As a mental stimulus, as a recreation
| |
| from the cares of life, his Greek authors would always be a first
| |
| love, as they proved to be; but he had abandoned his early ambition
| |
| of making them his everyday occupation and means of livelihood.
| |
| Of course there was only one career for a man of his leanings,
| |
| and, more and more, his mind was turning to journalism. For only
| |
| one brief period did he again listen to the temptations of a scholar's
| |
| existence. The university of his native state invited him to lecture
| |
| in the summer school of 1878; he took Shakespeare for his subject,
| |
| and made so great a success that there was some discussion of
| |
| his settling down permanently at Chapel Hill in the chair of Greek.
| |
| Had the offer definitely been made Page would probably have accepted,
| |
| but difficulties arose. Page was no longer orthodox in his religious
| |
| views; he had long outgrown dogma and could only smile at the
| |
| recollection that he had once thought of becoming a clergyman.
| |
| But a rationalist at the University of North Carolina in 1878
| |
| could hardly be endured. The offer, therefore, fortunately was
| |
| not made. Afterward Page was much criticized for having left his
| |
| native state at a time when it especially needed young men of
| |
| his type. It may therefore be recorded that, if there were any
| |
| blame at all, it rested upon North Carolina. He refers to his
| |
| disappointment in a letter in February, 1879---a letter that proved
| |
| to be a prophecy. "I shall some day buy a home," he
| |
| says, "where I was not allowed to work for one, and be laid
| |
| away in the soil that I love. I wanted to work for the old state;
| |
| it had no need for it, it seems."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>.
| |
|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><A NAME="ch2"></A><FONT SIZE="+2">CHAPTER II</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">JOURNALISM</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">I</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>THE five years from 1878 to 1883 Page spent in various places,
| |
| engaged, for the larger part of the time, in several kinds of
| |
| journalistic work. It was his period of struggle and of preparation.
| |
| Like many American public men he served a brief apprenticeship---in
| |
| his case, a very brief one---as a pedagogue. In the autumn of
| |
| 1878 he went to Louisville, Kentucky, and taught English for a
| |
| year at the Boys' High School. But he presently found an occupation
| |
| in this progressive city which proved far more absorbing. A few
| |
| months before his arrival certain energetic spirits had founded
| |
| a weekly paper, the <I>Age, </I>a journal which, they hoped, would
| |
| fill the place in the Southern States which the very successful
| |
| New York <I>Nation, </I>under the editorship of Godkin, was then
| |
| occupying in the North. Page at once began contributing leading
| |
| articles on literary and political topics to this publication;
| |
| the work proved so congenial that he purchased---on notes---a
| |
| controlling interest in the new venture and became its directing
| |
| spirit. The <I>Age </I>was in every way a worthy enterprise; in
| |
| the dignity of its makeup and the high literary standards at which
| |
| it aimed it imitated the London <I>Spectator. </I>Perhaps Page
| |
| obtained a thousand dollars' worth of fun out of his investment;
| |
| if so, that represented his entire profit. He now learned a lesson
| |
| which was emphasized in his after career as editor and publisher,
| |
| and that was that the Southern States provided a poor market for
| |
| books or periodicals. The net result of the proceeding was that,
| |
| at the age of twenty-three, he found himself out of a job and
| |
| considerably in debt.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>He has himself rapidly sketched his varied activities of the
| |
| next five years:
| |
|
| |
| <BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
| <br><br>"After trying in vain," he writes, "to get
| |
| work to do on any newspaper in North Carolina, I advertised for
| |
| a job in journalism---any sort of a job. By a queer accident
| |
| ---a fortunate one for me---the owner of the St. Joseph, Missouri,
| |
| <I>Gazelle, </I>answered the advertisement. Why he did it, I
| |
| never found out. He was in the same sort of desperate need of
| |
| a newspaper man as I was in desperate need of a job. I knew nothing
| |
| about him: he knew nothing about me. I knew nothing about newspaper
| |
| work. I had done nothing since I left the University but teach
| |
| English in the Louisville, Kentucky, High School for boys one
| |
| winter and lecture at the summer school at Chapel Hill one summer.
| |
| I made up my mind to go into journalism. But journalism didn't
| |
| seem in any hurry to make up its mind to admit me. Not only did
| |
| all the papers in North Carolina decline my requests for work,
| |
| but such of them in Baltimore and Louisville as I tried said
| |
| 'No.' So I borrowed $50 and set out to St. Joe, Missouri, where
| |
| I didn't know a human being. I became a reporter. At first I
| |
| reported the price of cattle---went to the stockyards, etc. My
| |
| salary came near to paying my board and lodging, but it didn't
| |
| quite do it. But I had a good time in St. Joe for somewhat more
| |
| than a year. There were interesting people there. I came to know
| |
| something about Western life. Kansas was across the river. I
| |
| often went there. I came to know Kansas City, St. Louis---a good
| |
| deal of the West. After a while I was made editor of the paper.
| |
| What a rousing political campaign or two we had! Then---I had
| |
| done that kind of a job as long as I cared to. Every swashbuckling
| |
| campaign is like every other one. Why do two? Besides, I knew
| |
| my trade. I had done everything on a daily paper from stockyard
| |
| reports to political editorials and heavy literary articles.
| |
| In the meantime I had written several magazine articles and done
| |
| other such jobs. I got leave of absence for a month or two. I
| |
| wrote to several of the principal papers in Chicago, New York,
| |
| and Boston and told them that I was going down South to make
| |
| political and social studies and that I was going to send them
| |
| my letters. I hoped they'd publish them.
| |
| <br><br>"That's all I could say. I could make no engagement;
| |
| they didn't know me. I didn't even ask for an engagement. I told
| |
| them simply this: that I'd write letters and send them; and I
| |
| prayed heaven that they'd print them and pay for them. Then off
| |
| I went with my little money in my pocket---about enough to get
| |
| to New Orleans. I travelled and I wrote. I went all over the
| |
| South. I sent letters and letters and letters. All the papers
| |
| published all that I sent them and I was rolling in wealth I
| |
| had money in my pocket for the first time in my life. Then I
| |
| went back to St. Joe and resigned; for the (old) New York <I>World</I>
| |
| had asked me to go to the Atlanta Exposition as a correspondent.
| |
| I went. I wrote and kept writing. How kind Henry Grady was to
| |
| me! But at last the Exposition ended. I was out of a job. I applied
| |
| to the <I>Constitution.</I> No,<I> </I>they wouldn't have me.
| |
| I never got a job in my life that I asked for! But all my life
| |
| better jobs have been given me than I dared ask for. Well---I
| |
| was at the end of my rope in Atlanta and I was trying to make
| |
| a living in any honest way I could when one day a telegram came
| |
| from the New York <I>World</I> (it was the old <I>World</I>,
| |
| which was one of the best of the dailies in its literary quality)
| |
| asking me to come to New York. I had never seen a man on the
| |
| paper---had never been in New York except for a day when I landed
| |
| there on a return voyage from a European trip that I took during
| |
| one vacation when I was in the University. Then I went to New
| |
| York straight and quickly. I had an interesting experience on
| |
| the old <I>World</I>, writing literary matter chiefly, an editorial
| |
| now and then, and I was frequently sent as a correspondent on
| |
| interesting errands. I travelled all over the country with the
| |
| Tariff Commission. I spent one winter in Washington as a sort
| |
| of editorial correspondent while the tariff bill was going through
| |
| Congress. Then, one day, the <I>World</I> was sold to Mr. Pulitzer
| |
| and all the staff resigned. The character of the paper changed."</BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>What better training could a journalist ask for than this?
| |
| Page was only twenty-eight when these five years came to an end;
| |
| but his life had been a comprehensive education in human contact,
| |
| in the course of which he had picked up many things that were
| |
| not included in the routine of Johns Hopkins University. From
| |
| Athens to St. Joe, from the comedies of Aristophanes to the stockyards
| |
| and political conventions of Kansas City---the transition may
| |
| possibly have been an abrupt one, but it is not likely that Page
| |
| so regarded it. For books and the personal relation both appealed
| |
| to him, in almost equal proportions, as essentials to the fully
| |
| rounded man. Merely from the standpoint of geography, Page's achievement
| |
| had been an important one; how many Americans, at the age of twenty-eight,
| |
| have such an extensive mileage to their credit? Page had spent
| |
| his childhood---and his childhood only---in North Carolina; he
| |
| had passed his youth in Virginia and Maryland; before he was twenty-three
| |
| he had lived several months in Germany, and, on his return voyage,
| |
| he had sailed by the white cliffs of England, and, from the deck
| |
| of his steamer, had caught glimpses of that Isle of Wight which
| |
| then held his youthful favourite Tennyson. He had added to these
| |
| experiences a winter in Kentucky and a sojourn of nearly two years
| |
| in Missouri. His Southern trip, to which Page refers in the above,
| |
| had taken him through Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia,
| |
| and Louisiana; he had visited the West again in 1882, spending
| |
| a considerable time in all the large cities, Chicago, Omaha, Denver,
| |
| Leadville, Salt Lake, and from the latter point he had travelled
| |
| extensively through Mormondom. The several months spent in Atlanta
| |
| had given the young correspondent a glimpse into the new South,
| |
| for this energetic city embodied a Southern spirit that was several
| |
| decades removed from the Civil War. After this came nearly two
| |
| years in New York and Washington, where Page gained his first
| |
| insight into Federal politics; in particular, as a correspondent
| |
| attached to the Tariff Commission---an assignment that again started
| |
| him on his travels to industrial centres---he came into contact,
| |
| for the first time, with the mechanism of framing the great American
| |
| tariff. And during this period Page was not only forming a first-hand
| |
| acquaintance with the passing scene, but also with important actors
| |
| in it. The mere fact that, on the St. Joseph <I>Gazelle, </I>he
| |
| succeeded Eugene Field---"a good fellow named Page is going
| |
| to take my desk," said the careless poet, "I hope he
| |
| will succeed to my debts too"---always remained a pleasant
| |
| memory. He entered zealously into the life of this active community;
| |
| his love of talk and disputation, his interest in politics, his
| |
| hearty laugh, his vigorous handclasp, his animation of body and
| |
| of spirit, and his sunny outlook on men and events---these are
| |
| the traits that his old friends in this town, some of whom still
| |
| survive, associate with the juvenile editor. In his Southern trip
| |
| Page called---self invited---upon Jefferson Davis and was cordially
| |
| received. At Atlanta, as he records above, he made friends with
| |
| that chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here
| |
| also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless
| |
| lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing
| |
| than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged
| |
| in putting together a brochure on <I>Congressional Government
| |
| </I>which immediately gave him a national standing. The name of
| |
| this sympathetic acquaintance was Woodrow Wilson.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br><CENTER><TABLE WIDTH="294" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="2"
| |
| CELLPADDING="0">
| |
| <TR>
| |
| <TD WIDTH="46%">
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <A HREF="images/Page04.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Page04tn.jpg"
| |
| WIDTH="72" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="1" ></A></TD>
| |
| <TD WIDTH="54%">
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <A HREF="images/Page05.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Page05tn.jpg"
| |
| WIDTH="103" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="1" ></A></TD>
| |
| </TR>
| |
| <TR>
| |
| <TD WIDTH="46%">
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <B><FONT COLOR="#0000ff">Fig. 4.</FONT></B><FONT
| |
| COLOR="#0000ff"> Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow
| |
| of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.</FONT></TD>
| |
| <TD WIDTH="54%">
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER> <B><FONT COLOR="#0000ff">Fig. 5.</FONT></B><FONT
| |
| COLOR="#0000ff"> Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek,
| |
| Johns Hopkins University, 1876-1915</FONT></TD>
| |
| </TR>
| |
| </TABLE></CENTER>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Another important event had taken place, for, at St. Louis,
| |
| on November 15, 1880, Page had married Miss Willia Alice Wilson.
| |
| Miss Wilson was the daughter of a Scotch physician, Dr. William
| |
| Wilson, who had settled in Michigan, near Detroit, in 1832.<I>
| |
| </I>When she was a small child she went with her sister's family---her
| |
| father had died seven years before---to North Carolina, near Cary;
| |
| and she and Page had been childhood friends and schoolmates. At
| |
| the time of the wedding, Page was editor of the St. Joseph <I>Gazelle;
| |
| </I>the fact that he had attained this position, five months after
| |
| starting at the bottom, sufficiently discloses his aptitude for
| |
| journalistic work.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page had now outgrown any Southern particularism with which
| |
| he may have started life. He no longer found his country exclusively
| |
| in the area south of the Potomac; he had made his own the West,
| |
| the North---New York, Chicago, Denver, as well as Atlanta and
| |
| Raleigh. It is worth while insisting on this fact, for the cultivation
| |
| of a wide-sweeping Americanism and a profound faith in democracy
| |
| became the qualities that will loom most largely in his career
| |
| from this time forward. It is necessary only to read the newspaper
| |
| letters which he wrote on his Southern trip in 1881 to understand
| |
| how early his mind seized this new point of view. Many things
| |
| which now fell under his observant eye in the Southern States
| |
| greatly irritated him and with his characteristic impulsiveness
| |
| he pictured these traits in pungent phrase. The atmosphere of
| |
| shiftlessness that too generally prevailed in some localities;
| |
| the gangs of tobacco-chewing loafers assembled around railway
| |
| stations; the listless Negroes that seemed to overhang the whole
| |
| country like a black cloud; the plantation mansions in a sad state
| |
| of disrepair; the old unoccupied slave huts overgrown with weeds;
| |
| the unpainted and broken-down fences; the rich soil that was crudely
| |
| and wastefully cultivated with a single crop---the youthful social
| |
| philosopher found himself comparing these vestigia of a half-moribund
| |
| civilization with the vibrant cities of the North, the beautiful
| |
| white and green villages of New England, and the fertile prairie
| |
| farms of the West. "Even the dogs," he said, "look
| |
| old-fashioned." Oh, for a change in his beloved South---a
| |
| change of almost any kind! "Even a heresy, if it be bright
| |
| and fresh, would be a relief. You feel as if you wished to see
| |
| some kind of an effort put forth, a discussion, a fight, a runaway,
| |
| anything to make the blood go faster." Wherever Page saw
| |
| signs of a new spirit---and he saw many---he recorded them with
| |
| an eagerness which showed his loyalty to the section of his birth.
| |
| The splitting up of great plantations into small farms he put
| |
| down as one of the indications of a new day. A growing tendency
| |
| to educate, not only the white child, but the Negro, inspired
| |
| a similar tribute. But he rejoiced most over the decreasing bitterness
| |
| of the masses over the memories of the Civil War, and discovered,
| |
| with satisfaction, that any remaining ill-feeling was a heritage
| |
| left not by the Union soldier, but by the carpetbagger.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>And one scene is worth preserving, for it illustrates not only
| |
| the zeal of Page himself for the common country, but the changing
| |
| attitude of the Southern people. It was enacted, at Martin, Tennessee,
| |
| on the evening of July 2, 1881. Page was spending a few hours
| |
| in the village grocery, discussing things in general with the
| |
| local yeomanry, when the telegraph operator came from the post
| |
| office with rather more than his usual expedition and excitement.
| |
| He was frantically waving a yellow slip which bore the news that
| |
| President Garfield had been shot. Garfield had been an energetic
| |
| and a successful general in the war and his subsequent course
| |
| in Congress, where he had joined the radical Republicans, had
| |
| not caused the South to look upon him as a friend. But these farmers
| |
| responded to this shock, not like sectionalists, but like Americans.
| |
| "Every man of them," Page records, "expressed almost
| |
| a personal sorrow. Little was said of politics or of parties.
| |
| Mr. Garfield was President of the United States---that was enough.
| |
| A dozen voices spoke the great gratification that the assassin
| |
| was not a Southern man. It was an affecting scene to see weather-beaten
| |
| old countrymen so profoundly agitated---men who yesterday I should
| |
| have supposed hardly knew and certainly did not seem to care who
| |
| was President. The great centres of population, of politicians,
| |
| and of thought may be profoundly agitated to-night, but no more
| |
| patriotic sorrow and humiliation is felt anywhere by any men than
| |
| by these old backwoods ex-Confederates."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page himself was so stirred by the news that he ascended a
| |
| cracker barrel, and made a speech to the assembled countrymen,
| |
| preaching to responsive ears the theme of North and South, now
| |
| reunited in a common sorrow. Thus, by the time he was twenty-six,
| |
| Page, at any rate in respect to his Americanism, was a full-grown
| |
| man.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>.
| |
|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">II</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>A few years afterward Page had an opportunity of discussing
| |
| this, his favourite topic, with the American whom he most admired.
| |
| Perhaps the finest thing in the career of Grover Cleveland was
| |
| the influence which he exerted upon young men. After the sordid
| |
| political transactions of the reconstruction period and after
| |
| the orgy of partisanship which had followed the Civil War, this
| |
| new figure, acceding to the Presidency in 1885, came as an inspiration
| |
| to millions of zealous and intelligent young college-bred Americans.
| |
| One of the first to feel the new spell was Walter Page; Mr. Cleveland
| |
| was perhaps the most important influence in forming his public
| |
| ideals. Of everything that Cleveland represented---civil service
| |
| reform; the cleansing of politics, state and national; the reduction
| |
| in the tariff; a foreign policy which, without degenerating into
| |
| truculence, manfully upheld the rights of American citizens; a
| |
| determination to curb the growing pension evil; the doctrine that
| |
| the Government was something to be served and not something to
| |
| be plundered---Page became an active and brilliant journalistic
| |
| advocate. It was therefore a great day in his life when, on a
| |
| trip to Washington in the autumn of 1885, he had an hour's private
| |
| conversation with President Cleveland, and it was entirely characteristic
| |
| of Page that he should make the conversation take the turn of
| |
| a discussion of the so-called Southern question.
| |
|
| |
| <BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
| <br><br>"In the White House at Washington," Page wrote about
| |
| this visit, "is an honest, plain, strong man, a man of wonderfully
| |
| broad information and of most uncommon industry. He has always
| |
| been a Democrat. He is a distinguished lawyer and a scholar on
| |
| all public questions. He is as frank and patriotic and sincere
| |
| as any man that ever won the high place he holds. Within less
| |
| than a year he has done so well and so wisely that he has disappointed
| |
| his enemies and won their admiration. He is as unselfish as he
| |
| is great. He is one of the most industrious men in the world.
| |
| He rises early and works late and does not waste his time---all
| |
| because his time is now not his own but the Republic's, whose
| |
| most honoured servant he is. I count it among the most inspiring
| |
| experiences in my life that I had the privilege, at the suggestion
| |
| of one of his personal friends, of talking with him one morning
| |
| about the complete reuniting of the two great sections of our
| |
| Republic by his election. I told him, and I know I told him the
| |
| truth, when I said that every young man in the Southern States
| |
| who, without an opportunity to share either the glory or the
| |
| defeat of the late Confederacy, had in spite of himself suffered
| |
| the disadvantages of the poverty and oppression that followed
| |
| war, took new hope for the full and speedy realization of a complete
| |
| union, of unparalleled prosperity and of broad thinking and noble
| |
| living from his elevation to the Presidency. I told him that
| |
| the men of North Carolina were not only patriotic but ambitious
| |
| as well; and that they were Democrats and proud citizens of the
| |
| State and the Republic not because they wanted offices or favours,
| |
| but because they loved freedom and wished the land that had been
| |
| impoverished by war to regain more than it had lost. 'I have
| |
| not called, Mr. President, to ask for an office for myself or
| |
| for anybody else,' I remarked; 'but to have the pleasure of expressing
| |
| my gratification, as a citizen of North Carolina, at the complete
| |
| change in political methods and morals that I believe will date
| |
| from your Administration.' He answered that he was glad to see
| |
| all men who came in such a spirit and did not come to beg---especially
| |
| young men of the South of to-day; and he talked and encouraged
| |
| me to talk freely as if he had been as small a man as I am, or
| |
| I as great a man as he is.
| |
| <br><br>"From that day to this it has been my business to watch
| |
| every public act that he does, to read every public word he speaks,
| |
| and it has been a pleasure and a benefit to me (like the benefit
| |
| that a man gets from reading a great history---for he is making
| |
| a great history) to study the progress of his Administration;
| |
| and at every step he seems to me to warrant the trust that the
| |
| great Democratic party put in him."</BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>The period to which Page refers in this letter represented
| |
| the time when he was making a serious and harassing attempt to
| |
| establish himself in his chosen profession in his native state.
| |
| He went south for a short visit after resigning his place on the
| |
| New York <I>World, </I>and several admirers in Raleigh persuaded
| |
| him to found a new paper, which should devote itself to preaching
| |
| the Cleveland ideals, and, above all, to exerting an influence
| |
| on the development of a new Southern spirit. No task could have
| |
| been more grateful to Page and there was no place in which he
| |
| would have better liked to undertake it than in the old state
| |
| which he loved so well. The result was the <I>Stale Chronicle
| |
| </I>of Raleigh, practically a new paper, which for a year and
| |
| a half proved to be the most unconventional and refreshing influence
| |
| that North Carolina had known in many a year. Necessarily Page
| |
| found himself in conflict with his environment. He had little
| |
| interest in the things that then chiefly interested the state,
| |
| and North Carolina apparently had little interest in the things
| |
| that chiefly occupied the mind of the youthful journalist. Page
| |
| was interested in Cleveland, in the reform of the civil service;
| |
| the Democrats of North Carolina little appreciated their great
| |
| national leader and were especially hostile to his belief that
| |
| service to a party did not in itself establish a qualification
| |
| for public office. Page was interested in uplifting the common
| |
| people, in helping every farmer to own his own acres, and in teaching
| |
| the most modern and scientific way of cultivating them; he was
| |
| interested in giving every boy and girl at least an elementary
| |
| education, and in giving a university training to such as had
| |
| the aptitude and the ambition to obtain it; he believed in industrial
| |
| training ---and in these things the North Carolina of those days
| |
| had little concern. Page even went so far as to take an open stand
| |
| for the pitiably neglected black man: he insisted that he should
| |
| be taught to read and write, and instructed in agriculture and
| |
| the manual trades. A man who advocated such revolutionary things
| |
| in those days was accused---and Page was so accused---of attempting
| |
| to promote the "social equality" of the two races. Page
| |
| also declaimed in favour of developing the state industrially;
| |
| he called attention to the absurdity of sending Southern cotton
| |
| to New England spinning mills, and he pointed out the boundless
| |
| but unworked natural resources of the state, in minerals, forests,
| |
| waterpower, and lands.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>North Carolina, he informed his astonished compatriots, had
| |
| once been a great manufacturing colony; why could the state not
| |
| become one again? But the matter in which the buoyant editor and
| |
| his constituents found themselves most at variance was the spirit
| |
| that controlled North Carolina life. It was a spirit that found
| |
| comfort for its present poverty and lack of progress in a backward
| |
| look at the greatness of the state in the past and the achievements
| |
| of its sons in the Civil War. Though Page believed that the Confederacy
| |
| had been a ghastly error, and though he abhorred the institution
| |
| of slavery and attributed to it all the woes, economic and social,
| |
| from which his section suffered, he rendered that homage to the
| |
| soldiers of the South which is the due of brave, self-sacrificing
| |
| and conscientious men; yet he taught that progress lay in regarding
| |
| the four dreadful years of the Civil War as the closed chapter
| |
| of an unhappy and mistaken history and in hastening the day when
| |
| the South should resume its place as a living part of the great
| |
| American democracy. All manifestations of a contrary spirit he
| |
| ridiculed in language which was extremely readable but which at
| |
| times outraged the good conservative people whom he was attempting
| |
| to convert. He did not even spare the one figure which was almost
| |
| a part of the Southerner's religion, the Confederate general,
| |
| especially that particular type who used his war record as a stepping
| |
| stone to public office, and whose oratory, colourful and turgid
| |
| in its celebrations of the past, Page regarded as somewhat unrelated,
| |
| in style and matter, to the realities of the present. The image-breaking
| |
| editor even asserted that the Daughters of the Confederacy were
| |
| not entirely a helpful influence in Southern regeneration; for
| |
| they, too, were harping always upon the old times and keeping
| |
| alive sectional antagonisms and hatreds. This he regarded as an
| |
| unworthy occupation for high-minded Southern women, and he said
| |
| so, sometimes in language that made him very unpopular in certain
| |
| circles.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Altogether it was a piquant period in Page's life. He found
| |
| that he had suddenly become a "traitor " to his country
| |
| and that his experiences in the North had completely "Yankeeized"
| |
| him. Even in more mature days, Page's pen had its javelin-like
| |
| quality; and in 1884, possessed as he was of all the fury of youth,
| |
| he never hesitated to return every blow that was rained upon his
| |
| head. As a matter of fact he had a highly enjoyable time. The
| |
| <I>State Chronicle </I>during his editorship is one of the most
| |
| cherished recollections of older North Carolinians to-day. Even
| |
| those who hurled the liveliest epithets in his direction have
| |
| long since accepted the ideas for which Page was then contending;
| |
| "the only trouble with him," they now ruefully admit,
| |
| "was that he was forty years ahead of his time." They
| |
| recall with satisfaction the satiric accounts which Page used
| |
| to publish of Democratic Conventions---solemn, long-winded, frock-coated,
| |
| white-necktied affairs that displayed little concern for the reform
| |
| of the tariff or of the civil service, but an energetic interest
| |
| in pensioning Confederate veterans and erecting monuments to the
| |
| Southern heroes of the Civil War. One editorial is joyfully recalled,
| |
| in which Page referred to a public officer who was distinguished
| |
| for his dignity and his family tree, but not noted for any animated
| |
| administration of his duties, as "Thothmes II." When
| |
| this bewildered functionary searched the Encyclopaedia and learned
| |
| that " Thothmes II " was an Egyptian king of the XVII1th
| |
| dynasty, whose dessicated mummy had recently been disinterred
| |
| from the hot sands of the desert, he naturally stopped his subscription
| |
| to the paper. The metaphor apparently tickled Page, for he used
| |
| it in a series of articles which have become immortal in the political
| |
| annals of North Carolina. These have always been known as the
| |
| "Mummy letters." They furnished a vivid but rather aggravating
| |
| explanation for the existing backwardness and chauvinism of the
| |
| commonwealth. All the trouble, it seems, was caused by the "mummies."
| |
| "It is an awfully discouraging business," Page wrote,
| |
| "to undertake to prove to a mummy that it is a mummy. You
| |
| go up to it and say, 'Old fellow, the Egyptian dynasties crumbled
| |
| several thousand years ago: you are a fish out of water. You have
| |
| by accident or the Providence of God got a long way out of your
| |
| time. This is America.' The old thing grins that grin. which death
| |
| set on its solemn features when the world was young; and your
| |
| task is so pitiful that even the humour of it is gone. Give it
| |
| up."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Everything great in North Carolina, Page declared, belonged
| |
| to a vanished generation. "Our great lawyers, great judges,
| |
| great editors, are all of the past. . . . In the general intelligence
| |
| of the people, in intellectual force and in cultivation, we are
| |
| doing nothing. We are not doing or getting more liberal ideas,
| |
| a broader view of this world. . . . The presumptuous powers of
| |
| ignorance, heredity, decayed respectability and stagnation that
| |
| control public action and public expression are absolutely leading
| |
| us back intellectually."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>But Page did more than berate the mummified aristocracy which,
| |
| he declared, was driving the best talent and initiative from the
| |
| state; he was not the only man in Raleigh who expressed these
| |
| unpopular views; at that time, indeed, he was the centre and inspiration
| |
| of a group of young progressive spirits who held frequent meetings
| |
| to devise ways of starting the state on the road to a new existence.
| |
| Page then, as always, exercised a great fascination over young
| |
| men. The apparently merciless character of his ridicule might
| |
| at first convey the idea of intolerance; the fact remains, however,
| |
| that he was the most tolerant of men; he was almost deferential
| |
| to the opinions of others, even the shallow and the inexperienced;
| |
| and nothing delighted him more than an animated discussion. His
| |
| liveliness of spirits, his mental and physical vitality, the constant
| |
| sparkle of his talk, the sharp edge of his humour, naturally drew
| |
| the younger men to his side. The result was the organization of
| |
| the Wautauga Club, a gathering which held monthly meetings for
| |
| the discussion of ways and means of improving social and educational
| |
| conditions in North Carolina. The very name gives the key to its
| |
| mental outlook. The Wautauga colony was one of the last founded
| |
| in North Carolina---in the extreme west, on a plateau of the Great
| |
| Smoky Mountains; it was always famous for the energy and independence
| |
| of its people. The word "Wautauga" therefore suggested
| |
| the breaker of tradition; and it provided a stimulating name for
| |
| Page's group of young spiritual and economic pathfinders. The
| |
| Wautauga Club had a brief existence of a little more than two
| |
| years, the period practically covering Page's residence in the
| |
| state; but its influence is an important fact at the present time.
| |
| It gave the state ideas that afterward caused something like a
| |
| revolution in its economic and educational status. The noblest
| |
| monument to its labours is the State College in Raleigh, an institution
| |
| which now has more than a thousand students, for the most part
| |
| studying the mechanic arts and scientific agriculture. To this
| |
| one college most North Carolinians to-day attribute the fact that
| |
| their state in appreciable measure is realizing its great economic
| |
| and industrial opportunities. From it in the last thirty years
| |
| thousands of young men have gone: in all sections of the commonwealth
| |
| they have caused the almost barren acres to yield fertile and
| |
| diversified crops; they have planted everywhere new industries;
| |
| they have unfolded unsuspected resources and everywhere created
| |
| wealth and spread enlightenment. This institution is a direct
| |
| outcome of Page's brief sojourn in his native state nearly forty
| |
| years ago. The idea originated in his brain; the files of the
| |
| <I>State Chronicle </I>tell the story of his struggle in its behalf;
| |
| the activities of the Wautauga Club were largely concentrated
| |
| upon securing its establishment.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>The State College was a great victory for Page, but final success
| |
| did not come until three years after he had left the state. For
| |
| a year and a half of hard newspaper work convinced Page that North
| |
| Carolina really had no permanent place for him. The <I>Chronicle
| |
| was </I>editorially a success: Page's articles were widely quoted,
| |
| not only in his own state but in New England and other parts of
| |
| the Union. He succeeded in stirring up North Carolina and the
| |
| South generally, but popular support for the <I>Chronicle was
| |
| </I>not forthcoming in sufficient amount to make the paper a commercial
| |
| possibility. Reluctantly and sadly Page had to forego his hope
| |
| of playing an active part in rescuing his state from the disasters
| |
| of the Civil War. Late in the summer of <I>1885, </I>he again
| |
| left for the North, which now became his permanent home.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>.
| |
|
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">III</FONT>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>And with this second sojourn in New York Page's opportunity
| |
| came. The first two years he spent in newspaper work, for the
| |
| most part with the <I>Evening Post, </I>but, one day in November,
| |
| 1887,<I> </I>a man whom he had never seen came into his office
| |
| and unfolded a new opportunity. Two years before a rather miscellaneous
| |
| group had launched an ambitious literary undertaking. This was
| |
| a monthly periodical, which, it was hoped, would do for the United
| |
| States what such publications as the <I>Fortnightly and </I>the
| |
| <I>Contemporary</I> were doing for England. The magazine was to
| |
| have the highest literary quality and to be sufficiently dignified
| |
| to attract the finest minds in America as contributors; its purpose
| |
| was to exercise a profound influence in politics, literature,
| |
| science, and art. The projectors had selected for this publication
| |
| a title that was almost perfection---the <I>Forum</I>---but this,
| |
| after nearly two years' experimentation, represented about the
| |
| limit of their achievement. The <I>Forum</I> had hardly made an
| |
| impression on public thought and had attracted very few readers,
| |
| although it had lost large sums of money for its progenitors.
| |
| These public-spirited gentlemen now turned to Page as the man
| |
| who might rescue them from their dilemma and achieve their purpose.
| |
| He accepted the engagement, first as manager and presently as
| |
| editor, and remained the guiding spirit of the <I>Forum</I> for
| |
| eight years, until the summer of 1895.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>That the success of a publication is the success of its editors,
| |
| and not of its business managers and its "backers,"
| |
| is a truth that ought to be generally apparent; never has this
| |
| fact been so eloquently illustrated as in the case of the <I>Forum</I>
| |
| under Page. Before his accession it had had not the slightest
| |
| importance; for the period of his editorship it is doubtful if
| |
| any review published in English exercised so great an influence,
| |
| and certainly none ever obtained so large a circulation. From
| |
| almost nothing the <I>Forum</I>, in two or three years, attracted
| |
| 30,000 subscribers---something without precedent for a publication
| |
| of this character. It had accomplished this great result simply
| |
| because of the vitality and interest of its contents. The period
| |
| covered was an important one, in the United States and Europe;
| |
| it was the time of Cleveland's second administration in this country,
| |
| and of Gladstone's fourth administration in England; it was a
| |
| time of great controversy and of a growing interest in science,
| |
| education, social reform and a better political order. All these
| |
| great matters were reflected in the pages of the <I>Forum</I>,
| |
| whose list of contributors contained the most distinguished names
| |
| in all countries. Its purpose, as Page explained it, was "to
| |
| provoke discussion about subjects of contemporary interest, in
| |
| which the magazine is not a partisan, but merely the instrument."
| |
| In the highest sense, that is, its purpose was journalistic; practically
| |
| everything that it printed was related to the thought and the
| |
| action of the time. So insistent was Page on this programme that
| |
| his pages were not "closed" until a week before the
| |
| day of issue. Though the <I>Forum</I> dealt constantly in controversial
| |
| subjects it never did so in a narrow-minded spirit; it was always
| |
| ready to hear both sides of a question and the magazine "debate,"
| |
| in which opposing writers handled vigorously the same theme, was
| |
| a constant feature.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page, indeed, represented a new type of editor. Up to that
| |
| time this functionary had been a rather solemn, inaccessible high
| |
| priest; he sat secluded in his sanctuary, and weeded out from
| |
| the mass of manuscripts dumped upon his desk the particular selections
| |
| which seemed to be most suited to his purpose. To solicit contributions
| |
| would have seemed an entirely undignified proceeding; in all cases
| |
| contributors must come to him. According to Page, however, "an
| |
| editor must know men and be out among men." His system of
| |
| "making up" the magazine at first somewhat astounded
| |
| his associates. A month or two in advance of publication day he
| |
| would draw up his table of contents. This, in its preliminary
| |
| stage, amounted to nothing except a list of the main subjects
| |
| which he aspired to handle in that number. It was a hope, not
| |
| a performance. The subjects were commonly suggested by the happenings
| |
| of the time---an especially outrageous lynching, the trial of
| |
| a clergyman for heresy, a new attack upon the Monroe Doctrine,
| |
| the discovery of a new substance such as radium, the publication
| |
| of an epoch-making book. Page would then fix upon the inevitable
| |
| men who could write most readably and most authoritatively upon
| |
| these topics, and "go after" them. Sometimes he would
| |
| write one of his matchless editorial letters; at other times he
| |
| would make a personal visit; if necessary, he would use any available
| |
| friends in a wire-pulling campaign. At all odds he must "get"
| |
| his man; once he had fixed upon a certain contributor nothing
| |
| could divert him from the chase. Nor did the negotiations cease
| |
| after he had "landed" his quarry. He had his way of
| |
| discussing the subject with his proposed writer, and he discussed
| |
| it from every possible point of view. He would take him to lunch
| |
| or to dinner; in his quiet way he would draw him out, find whether
| |
| he really knew much about the subject, learn the attitude that
| |
| he was likely to take, and delicately slip in suggestions of his
| |
| own. Not infrequently this preliminary interview would disclose
| |
| that the much sought writer, despite appearances, was not the
| |
| one who was destined for that particular job; in this case Page
| |
| would find some way of shunting him in favour of a more promising
| |
| candidate. But Page was no mere chaser of names; there was nothing
| |
| of the literary tuft-hunter about his editorial methods. He liked
| |
| to see such men as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William
| |
| Graham. Sumner, Charles W. Eliot, Frederic Harrison, Paul Bourget,
| |
| and the like upon his title page---and here these and many other
| |
| similarly distinguished authors appeared---but the greatest name
| |
| could not attain a place there if the letter press that followed
| |
| were unworthy. Indeed Page's habit of throwing out the contributions
| |
| of the great, after paying a stiff price for them, caused much
| |
| perturbation in his counting room. One day he called in one of
| |
| his associates.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>"Do you see that waste basket?" he asked, pointing
| |
| to a large receptacle filled to overflowing with manuscripts.
| |
| "All our Cleveland articles are there!"
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>He had gone to great trouble and expense to obtain a series
| |
| of six articles from the most prominent publicists and political
| |
| leaders of the country on the first year of Mr. Cleveland's second
| |
| administration. It was to be the "feature" of the number
| |
| then in preparation.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>"There isn't one of them," he declared, "who
| |
| has got the point. I have thrown them all away and I am going
| |
| to try to write something myself."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>And he spent a couple of days turning out an article which
| |
| aroused great public interest. When Page commissioned an article,
| |
| he meant simply that he would pay full price for it; whether he
| |
| would publish it depended entirely upon the quality of the material
| |
| itself. But Page was just as severe upon his own writings as upon
| |
| those of other men. He wrote occasionally---always under a nom-de-plume;
| |
| but he had great difficulty in satisfying his own editorial standards.
| |
| After finishing an article he would commonly send for one of his
| |
| friends and read the result.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>"That is superb!" this admiring associate would sometimes
| |
| say.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>In response Page would take the manuscript and, holding it
| |
| aloft in two hands, tear it into several bits, and throw the scraps
| |
| into the waste basket.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>"Oh, I can do better than that," he would laugh and
| |
| in another minute he was busy rewriting the article, from beginning
| |
| to end.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page retired from the editorship of the <I>Forum </I>in 1895.
| |
| The severance of relations was half a comedy, half a tragedy.
| |
| The proprietors had only the remotest relation to literature;
| |
| they had lost much money in the enterprise before Page became
| |
| editor and only the fortunate accident of securing his services
| |
| had changed their losing venture into a financial success. In
| |
| a moment of despair, before the happier period had arrived, they
| |
| offered to sell the property to Page and his friends. Page quickly
| |
| assembled a new group to purchase control, when, much to the amazement
| |
| of the old owners, the <I>Forum </I>began to make money. Instead
| |
| of having a burden on their hands, the proprietors suddenly discovered
| |
| that they had a gold mine. They therefore refused to deliver their
| |
| holdings and an inevitable struggle ensued for control. Page could
| |
| edit a magazine and turn a shipwrecked enterprise into a profitable
| |
| one; but, in a tussle of this kind, he was no match for the shrewd
| |
| business men who owned the property. When the time came for counting
| |
| noses Page and his friends found themselves in a minority. Of
| |
| course his resignation as editor necessarily followed this little
| |
| unpleasantness. And just as inevitably the <I>Forum </I>again
| |
| began to lose money, and soon sank into an obscurity from which
| |
| it has never emerged.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>The <I>Forum </I>had established Page's reputation as an editor,
| |
| and the competition for his services was lively. The distinguished
| |
| Boston publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company immediately
| |
| invited him to become a part of their organization. When Horace
| |
| E. Scudder, in 1898, resigned the editorship of the <I>Atlantic
| |
| Monthly, </I>Page succeeded him. Thus Page became the successor
| |
| of James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, William D. Howells,
| |
| and Thomas Bailey Aldrich as the head of this famous periodical.
| |
| This meant that he had reached the top of his profession. He was
| |
| now forty-three years old.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>No American publication had ever had so brilliant a history.
| |
| Founded in 1857, in the most flourishing period of the New England
| |
| writers, its pages had first published many of the best essays
| |
| of Emerson, the second series of the Biglow papers as well as
| |
| many other of Lowell's writings, poems of Longfellow and Whittier,
| |
| such great successes as Holmes's "Autocrat of the Breakfast
| |
| Table," Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic,"
| |
| and the early novels of Henry James. If America had a literature,
| |
| the <I>Atlantic </I>was certainly its most successful periodical
| |
| exponent. Yet, in a sense, the <I>Atlantic, </I>by the time Page
| |
| succeeded to the editorship, had become the victim of its dazzling
| |
| past. Its recent editors had lived too exclusively in their back
| |
| numbers. They had conducted the magazine too much for the restricted
| |
| audience of Boston and New England. There was a time, indeed,
| |
| when the business office arranged the subscribers in two classes---"
| |
| Boston" and "foreign"; "Boston" representing
| |
| their local adherents, and "foreign" the loyal readers
| |
| who lived in the more benighted parts of the United States. One
| |
| of its editors had been heard to boast that he never solicited
| |
| a contribution; it was not his business to be a literary drummer!
| |
| Let the truth be fairly spoken: when Page made his first appearance
| |
| in the <I>Atlantic </I>office, the magazine was unquestionably
| |
| on the decline. Its literary quality was still high; the momentum
| |
| that its great contributors had given it was still keeping the
| |
| publication alive; entrance into its columns still represented
| |
| the ultimate ambition of the aspiring American writer; but it
| |
| needed a new spirit to insure its future. What it required was
| |
| the kind of editing that had suddenly made the <I>Forum </I>one
| |
| of the greatest of English-written reviews. This is the reason
| |
| why the canny Yankee proprietors had reached over to New York
| |
| and grasped Page as quickly as the capitalists of the <I>Forum
| |
| </I>let him slip between their fingers.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page's sense of humour discovered a certain ironic aspect in
| |
| his position as the dictator of this famous New England magazine.
| |
| The fact that his manner was impatiently energetic and somewhat
| |
| startling to the placid atmosphere of Park Street was not the
| |
| thing that really signified its break with its past. But here
| |
| was a Southerner firmly entrenched in a headquarters that had
| |
| long been sacred to the New England abolitionists. One of the
| |
| first sights that greeted Page, as he came into the office, was
| |
| the angular and spectacled countenance of William Lloyd Garrison,
| |
| gazing down from a steel engraving on the wall. One of Garrison's
| |
| sons was a colleague, and the anterooms were frequently cluttered
| |
| with dusky gentlemen patiently waiting for interviews with this
| |
| benefactor of their race. Page once was careless enough to inform
| |
| Mr. Garrison that "one of your niggers" was waiting
| |
| outside for an audience. "I very much regret, Mr. Page,"
| |
| came the answer, "that you should insist on spelling 'Negro'
| |
| with two 'g's'." Despite the mock solemnity of this rebuke,
| |
| perennial good-nature and raillery prevailed between the son of
| |
| Garrison and his disrespectful but ever sympathetic Southern friend.
| |
| Indeed, one of Page's earliest performances was to introduce a
| |
| spirit of laughter and genial cooperation into a rather solemn
| |
| and self-satisfied environment. Mr. Mifflin, the head of the house,
| |
| even formally thanked Page "for the hearty human way in which
| |
| you take hold of life." Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, the present
| |
| editor of the <I>Atlantic, </I>has described the somewhat disconcerting
| |
| descent of Page upon the editorial sanctuary of James Russell
| |
| Lowell:
| |
|
| |
| <BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
| <br><br>"Were a visitant from another sphere to ask me for the
| |
| incarnation of those qualities we love to call American, I should
| |
| turn to a familiar gallery of my memory and point to the living
| |
| portrait that hangs there of Walter Page. A sort of foursquareness,
| |
| bluntness, it seemed to some; an uneasy, often explosive energy;
| |
| a disposition to underrate fine drawn nicenesses of all sorts;
| |
| ingrained Yankee common sense, checking his vaulting enthusiasm;
| |
| enormous self-confidence, impatience of failure---all of these
| |
| were in him; and he was besides affectionate to a fault, devoted
| |
| to his country, his family, his craft---a strong, bluff, tender
| |
| man.
| |
| <br><br>"Those were the decorous days of the old tradition, and
| |
| Page's entrance into the 'atmosphere' of Park Street has taken
| |
| on the dignity of legend. There were all kinds of signs and portents,
| |
| as the older denizens will tell you. Strange breezes floated
| |
| through the office, electric emanations, and a pervasive scent
| |
| of tobacco, which---so the local historian says---had been unknown
| |
| in the vicinity since the days of Walter Raleigh, except for
| |
| the literary aroma of Aldrich's quarantined sanctum upstairs.
| |
| Page's coming marked the end of small ways. His first requirement
| |
| was, in lieu of a desk, a table that might have served a family
| |
| of twelve for Thanksgiving dinner. No one could imagine what
| |
| that vast, polished tableland could serve for until they watched
| |
| the editor at work. Then they saw. Order vanished and chaos reigned.
| |
| Huge piles of papers, letters, articles, reports, books, pamphlets,
| |
| magazines, congregated themselves as if by magic. To work in
| |
| such confusion seemed hopeless, but Page eluded the congestion
| |
| by the simple expedient of moving on. He would light a fresh
| |
| cigar, give the editorial chair a hitch, and begin his work in
| |
| front of a fresh expanse of table, with no clutter of the past
| |
| to disturb the new day's litter.
| |
| <br><br>"The motive power of his work was enthusiasm. Never was
| |
| more generous welcome given to a newcomer than Page held out
| |
| to the successful manuscript of an unknown. I remember, though
| |
| I heard the news second hand at the time, what a day it was in
| |
| the office when the first manuscript from the future author of
| |
| 'To Have and To Hold,' came in from an untried Southern girl.
| |
| He walked up and down, reading paragraphs aloud and slapping
| |
| the crisp manuscript to enforce his commendation. To take a humbler
| |
| instance, I recall the words of over generous praise with which
| |
| he greeted the first paper I ever sent to an editor quite as
| |
| clearly as I remember the monstrous effort which had brought
| |
| it into being. Sometimes he would do a favoured manuscript the
| |
| honour of taking it out to lunch in his coat-pocket, and an associate
| |
| vividly recalls eggs, coffee, and pie in a near-by restaurant,
| |
| while, in a voice that could be heard by the remotest lunchers.
| |
| Page read passages which many of them were too startled to appreciate.
| |
| He was not given to overrating, but it was not in his nature
| |
| to understate. 'I tell you,' said he, grumbling over some unfortunate
| |
| proof-sheets from Manhattan, 'there isn't one man in New York
| |
| who can write English---not from the Battery to Harlem Heights.'
| |
| And if the faults were moral rather than literary, his disapproval
| |
| grew in emphasis. There is more than tradition in the tale of
| |
| the Negro who, presuming on Page's deep interest in his race,
| |
| brought to his desk a manuscript copied word for word from a
| |
| published source. Page recognized the deception, and seizing
| |
| the rascal's collar with a firm editorial grip, rejected the
| |
| poem, and ejected the poet, with an energy very invigorating
| |
| to the ancient serenities of the office.
| |
| <br><br>"Page was always effervescent with ideas. Like an editor
| |
| who would have made a good fisherman, he used to say that you
| |
| had to cast a dozen times before you could get a strike. He was
| |
| forever in those days sending out ideas and suggestions and invitations
| |
| to write. The result was electric, and the magazine became with
| |
| a suddenness (of which only an editor can appreciate the wonder)
| |
| a storehouse of animating thoughts. He avoided the mistake common
| |
| to our craft of editing a magazine for the immediate satisfaction
| |
| of his colleagues. 'Don't write for the office,' he would say.
| |
| 'Write for outside,' and so his magazine became a living thing.
| |
| His phrase suggests one special gift that Page had, for which
| |
| his profession should do him especial honour. He was able, quite
| |
| beyond the powers of any man of my acquaintance, to put compendiously
| |
| into words the secrets of successful editing. It was capital
| |
| training just to hear him talk. 'Never save a feature,' he used
| |
| to say. 'Always work for the next number. Forget the others.
| |
| Spend everything just on that.' And to those who know, there
| |
| is divination in the principle. Again he understood instinctively
| |
| that to write well a man must not only have something to say,
| |
| but must long to say it. A highly intelligent representative
| |
| of the coloured race came to him with a philosophic essay, Page
| |
| would have none of it. 'I know what you are thinking of,' said
| |
| Page. 'You are thinking of the barriers we set up against you,
| |
| and the handicap of your lot. If you will write what it feels
| |
| like to be a Negro, I will print that.' The result was a paper
| |
| which has seemed to me the most moving expression of the hopeless
| |
| hope of the race I know of.
| |
| <br><br>"Page was generous in his cooperation. He never drew
| |
| a rigid line about his share in any enterprise, but gave and
| |
| took help with each and all. A lover of good English, with an
| |
| honest passion for things tersely said, Page esteemed good journalism
| |
| far above any second-rate manifestation of more pretentious forms;
| |
| but many of us will regret that he was not privileged to find
| |
| some outlet for his energies in which aspiration for real literature
| |
| might have played an ampler part. For the literature of the past
| |
| Page had great respect, but his interest was ever in the present
| |
| and the future. He was forever fulminating against bad writing,
| |
| and hated the ignorant and slipshod work of the hack almost as
| |
| much as he despised the sham of the man who affected letters,
| |
| the dabbler and the poetaster. His taste was for the roast beef
| |
| of literature, not for the side dishes and the trimmings, and
| |
| his appreciation of the substantial work of others was no surer
| |
| than his instinct for his own performance. He was an admirable
| |
| writer of exposition, argument, and narrative-solid and thoughtful,
| |
| but never dull. . . . I came into close relations with him and
| |
| from him I learned more of my profession than from any one I
| |
| have ever known. Scores of other men would say the same."</BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>But the fact that a new hand had seized the <I>Atlantic </I>was
| |
| apparent in other places than in the <I>Atlantic </I>office itself.
| |
| One of Page's contributors of the <I>Forum</I> days, Mr. Courtney
| |
| DeKalb, happened to be in St. Louis when the first number of the
| |
| magazine under its new editor made its appearance. Mr. DeKalb
| |
| had been out of the country for some time and knew nothing of
| |
| the change. Happening accidentally to pick up the <I>Atlantic,
| |
| </I>the table of contents caught his eye. It bore the traces of
| |
| an unmistakable hand. Only one man, he said to himself, could
| |
| assemble such a group as that, and above all, only Page could
| |
| give such an enticing turn of the titles. He therefore sat down
| |
| and wrote his old friend congratulating him on his accession to
| |
| the <I>Atlantic Monthly. </I>The change that now took. place was
| |
| indeed a conspicuous, almost a startling one. The <I>Atlantic
| |
| </I>retained all its old literary flavour, for to its traditions
| |
| Page was as much devoted as the highest caste Bostonian; it still
| |
| gave up much of its space to a high type of fiction, poetry, and
| |
| reviews of contemporary literature, but every number contained
| |
| also an assortment of articles which celebrated the prevailing
| |
| activities of men and women in all worthwhile fields of effort.
| |
| There were discussions of present-day politics, and these even
| |
| became personal dissections of presidential candidates; there
| |
| were articles on the racial characters of the American population:
| |
| Theodore Roosevelt was permitted to discuss the New York police;
| |
| Woodrow Wilson to pass in review the several elements that made
| |
| the Nation; Booker T. Washington to picture the awakening of the
| |
| Negro; John Muir to enlighten Americans upon a national beauty
| |
| and wealth of which they had been woefully ignorant, their forests;
| |
| William Allen White to describe certain aspects of his favourite
| |
| Kansas; E. L. Godkin to review the dangers and, the hopes of American
| |
| democracy; Jacob Riis to tell about the Battle with the Slum;
| |
| and W. G. Frost to reveal for the first time the archaic civilization
| |
| of the Kentucky mountaineers. The latter article illustrated Page's
| |
| genius at rewriting titles. Mr. Frost's theme was that these Kentucky
| |
| mountaineers were really Elizabethan survivals; that their dialect,
| |
| their ballads, their habits were really a case of arrested development;
| |
| that by studying them present-day Americans could get a picture
| |
| of their distant forbears. Page gave vitality to the presentation
| |
| by changing a commonplace title to this one: "Our Contemporary
| |
| Ancestors."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>There were those who were offended by Page's willingness to
| |
| seek inspiration on the highways and byways and even in newspapers,
| |
| for not infrequently he would find hidden away in a corner an
| |
| idea that would result in valuable magazine matter. On one occasion
| |
| at least this practice had important literary consequences. One
| |
| day he happened to read that a Mrs. Robert Hanning had died in
| |
| Toronto, the account casually mentioning the fact that Mrs. Hanning
| |
| was the youngest sister of Thomas Carlyle. Page handed this clipping
| |
| to a young assistant, and told him to take the first train to
| |
| Canada. The editor could easily divine that a sister of Carlyle,
| |
| expatriated for forty-six years on this side of the Atlantic,
| |
| must have received a large number of letters from her brother,
| |
| and it was safe to assume that they had been carefully preserved.
| |
| Such proved to be the fact; and a new volume of Carlyle letters,
| |
| of somewhat more genial character than the other collections,
| |
| was the outcome of this visit.(<A NAME="n4"></A><A HREF="Pagenotes.htm#4">4</A>)
| |
| And another fruit of this journalistic habit was---The Memoirs
| |
| of a Revolutionist," by Prince Peter Kropotkin. In 1897 the
| |
| great Russian nihilist was lecturing in Boston. Page met him,
| |
| learned from his own lips his story, and persuaded him to put
| |
| it in permanent form. This willingness of Page to admit such a
| |
| revolutionary person into the pages of the <I>Atlantic</I> caused
| |
| some excitement in conventional circles. In fact, it did take
| |
| some courage, but Page never hesitated; the man was of heroic
| |
| mould, he had a great story to tell, he wielded an engaging pen,
| |
| and his purposes were high-minded. A great book of memoirs was
| |
| the result.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Mr. Sedgwick refers above to Page's editorial fervour when
| |
| Miss Mary Johnston's "Prisoners of Hope" first fell
| |
| out of the blue sky into his Boston office. Page's joy was not
| |
| less keen because the young author was a Virginia girl, and because
| |
| she had discovered that the early period of Virginia history was
| |
| a field for romance. When, a few months afterward, Page was casting
| |
| about for an Atlantic serial, Miss Johnston and this Virginia
| |
| field seemed to be an especially favourable prospect. "Prisoners
| |
| of Hope" had been published as a book and had made a good
| |
| success, but Miss Johnston's future still lay ahead of her. With
| |
| Page to think meant to act, and so, instead of writing a formal
| |
| letter, he at once jumped on a train for Birmingham, Alabama,
| |
| where Miss Johnston was then living. "I remember quite distinctly
| |
| that first meeting," writes Miss Johnston. "The day
| |
| was rainy. Standing at my window I watched Mr. Page---a characteristic
| |
| figure, air and walk---approach the house. When a few minutes
| |
| later I met him he was simplicity and kindliness itself. This
| |
| was my first personal contact with publishers (my publishers)
| |
| or with editors of anything so great as the <I>Atlantic. </I>My
| |
| heart beat! But he was friendly and Southern. I told him what
| |
| I had done upon a new story. He was going on that night. Might
| |
| he take the manuscript with him and read it upon the train? It
| |
| might---he couldn't say positively, of course---but it might have
| |
| serial possibilities. I was only too glad for him to have the
| |
| manuscript. I forget just how many chapters I had completed. But
| |
| it was not quite in order. Could I get it so in a few hours? In
| |
| that case he would send a messenger for it from the hotel. Yes,
| |
| I could. Very good! A little further talk and he left with a strong
| |
| handshake. Three or four hours later he had the manuscript and
| |
| took it with him from Birmingham that night."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page's enterprising visit had put into his hands the half-finished
| |
| manuscript of a story, "To Have and to Hold," which,
| |
| when printed in the <I>Atlantic, </I>more than doubled its circulation,
| |
| and which, when made into a book, proved one of the biggest successes
| |
| since "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page's most independent stroke in his <I>Atlantic </I>days
| |
| came with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Boston was
| |
| then the headquarters of a national mood which has almost passed
| |
| out of popular remembrance. Its spokesmen called themselves anti-imperialists.
| |
| The theory back of their protest was that the American declaration
| |
| of war on Spain was not only the wanton attack of a great bully
| |
| upon a feeble little country: it was something that was bound
| |
| to have deplorable consequences. The United States was breaking
| |
| with its past and engaging in European quarrels; as a consequence
| |
| of the war it would acquire territories and embark on a career
| |
| of "imperialism." Page was impatient at this kind of
| |
| twaddle. He declared that the Spanish War was a "necessary
| |
| act of surgery for the health of civilization." He did not
| |
| believe that a nation, simply because it was small, should be
| |
| permitted to maintain indefinitely a human slaughter house at
| |
| the door of the United States. The <I>Atlantic </I>for June, 1898,
| |
| gave the so-called anti-imperialists a thrill of horror. On the
| |
| cover appeared the defiantly flying American flag; the first article
| |
| was a vigorous and approving presentation of the American case
| |
| against Spain; though this was unsigned, its incisive style at
| |
| once betrayed the author. The <I>Atlantic </I>had printed the
| |
| American flag on its cover during the Civil War; but certain New
| |
| Englanders thought that this latest struggle, in its motives and
| |
| its proportions, was hardly entitled to the distinction. Page
| |
| declared, however, that the Spanish War marked a new period in
| |
| history; and he endorsed the McKinley Administration, not only
| |
| in the war itself, but in its consequences, particularly the annexation
| |
| of the Philippine Islands.
| |
|
| |
| <br><br>Page greatly enjoyed life in Boston and Cambridge. The <I>Atlantic
| |
| </I>was rapidly growing in circulation and in influence, and the
| |
| new friends that its editor was making were especially to his
| |
| taste. He now had a family of four children, three boys and one
| |
| girl---and their bringing up and education, as he said at this
| |
| time, constituted his real occupation. So far as he could see,
| |
| in the summer of 1899, he was permanently established in life.
| |
| But larger events in the publishing world now again pulled him
| |
| hack to New York.
| |
|
| |
| <BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
| <P ALIGN=CENTER><HR>
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| <br><br><FONT SIZE="+1"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/2b.gif" WIDTH="25" HEIGHT="24"
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| ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0" ><A HREF="Page02.htm">Chapter
| |
| Three</A></FONT>
| |
| <br><br><FONT SIZE="+1"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/2b.gif" WIDTH="25" HEIGHT="24"
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| ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0" ><A HREF="PageTC.htm#TC">Table
| |
| of Contents</A></FONT>
| |
| </BLOCKQUOTE>
| |
|
| |
| </BODY>
| |
| </HTML>
| |